Do we want news or PR?

  The former editor of the United Methodist Reporter left the newspaper in part because of philosophical differences with new management at the Reporter. The differences were apparently about how to handle controversial issues in the paper.

In a column in the July/August  Zion's Herald, Cynthia Astle, who had written for and edited  the Reporter for 17 years, says the Reporter's new management wants to remove reader response items and letters to the editor from the newspaper. While not mentioning her by name, Astle implies that the Reporter's new CEO and president Sarah Wilke, the daughter of retired Bishop Richard Wilke, wants to downplay disagreements and controversies within United Methodism in order to "build up" the church.

"The rationale for this move typically asserts that dissent distracts from the church’s mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ, i.e., that dialogue blocks efforts to increase numerical membership, and therefore economic viability, of the institution," Astle writes.

Astle says she has also heard from several conference newspaper editors who say they are under pressure from bishops and council directors to remove letters to the editor and reader response columns from their papers in order to downplay dissent within the denomination.

Astle agrees that the church's mission is to make disciples of Jesus Christ but, she says, one of the missions of disciples of Jesus Christ is to transform the world. "How can we transform a world of which we limit our knowledge and about which we refuse to dialogue?" she asks.

This is not as simple a discussion as one might suppose. Not legally, but for all intents and purposes, the United Methodist Reporter is a denominational organ rather than an independent church newspaper. The Reporter is not owned by the United Methodist Church, but it is financially dependent upon annual conferences that contract with it to produce their conference publications. For this reason it is not truly independent like, say, the National Catholic Reporter is.

United Methodist News Service has an excellent reputation for accuracy and objectivity but it is fully church-owned and operated. Almost all conference newspapers (the Michigan Christian Advocate is an exception) are owned and operated by annual conferences. In many papers the bishop is listed as the publisher. Annual conferences, thus, assume that the paper's job is to promote the programs and agenda of the conference.

Yet, newspaper editors often believe that their job is to report the news objectively—including the “bad news” —and to offer editorial opinions prophetically. Thus, you end up with the kind of tension that seems to have erupted at the Reporter.

Being the editor of a church owned or financed newspaper is no easy task. You owe it to church leaders to articulate their agenda in an inspiring way. You also owe it to church members to provide objective information about controversial issues. You need to provide a forum for discussion and debate when leaders may wish the disagreement did not exist and suppose that if we just didn’t talk about it so much it would go away. You have to do all this without becoming an instrument of any faction’s agenda. This is a tough tightrope to walk.

  Meanwhile the United Methodist Reporter has named a new editor: Robin Galiano Russell, a secular newspaper religion reporter currently writing for the Dallas Morning News. Russell says she loves to tell narrative “stories of faith.” Presumably this means more human interest, less controversial reporting. It may also be noteworthy that she wants to put more attention on the larger faith community beyond United Methodism and that she herself attends a nondenominational rather than a United Methodist Church.

As a subscriber to the Reporter, my opinion is that there are a lot of places where I can read news about the larger faith community but relatively few that focus on United Methodism. And I love inspiring human interest stories, but downplaying differences and dissent doesn’t make them go away.